Originally posted by Jonathan Mac
The most likely thing is that it will mutate into something less deadly, like a standard flu, and then hang around forever. Killing your host, at least quickly, is not a good survival strategy, and in an organism capable of using science and shared knowledge to fight back, killing many hosts puts a target on your back. Of course CoViD-deniers, anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers do their best to lower us to the level of the other beasts that inhabit the earth but we need to fight that too.
While this is the more likely scenario, mutations are more random chance than intelligent design, with the very real possibility of getting a mutation that acts more like Ebola than the common cold.
It is more likely that Covid-19 will mutate into an annoying endemic, much like the common cold, which is also a corona virus, but it could also move in a different direction.
The Delta variant, for example, seems to be much more infectious and somewhat more deadly. If the virus continues to mutate in that direction, we could be in for a world of hurting.
Quote: It occurred to me a few days ago that before we had the vaccine the most prominent display of ignorance from the anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers/anti-science was that they refused to wear masks, socially distance or take other non-medical measures to protect themselves or others. The rest of us were angry because they were as likely to endanger or kill other people as themselves, but now things have changed. Now the number one defining behaviour of these people is that they refuse to vaccinate, which means that the balance of risk has shifted more to them and away from the people around them. As much as I loath to see people dying, I can't help but see that this is now natural selection at work.
Well yes, at some point, we can start handing out posthumous Darwin Awards to unvaccinated people.
---------- Post added Aug 19th, 2021 at 11:06 AM ----------
Originally posted by Rondec
COVID has been a really tough situation. Recommendations now versus a year and a half ago have changed due to studies showing what things have worked and what haven't. Early on, the CDC didn't recommend wearing masks unless you felt sick and then you were really supposed to be in isolation. This was because they didn't think there was much asymptomatic spread and there was a shortage of personal protective equipment for health care workers. Later, it turned out that probably at least 50 percent of the spread of COVID is done by presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals and there was no longer a mask shortage and they changed their recommendations.
I think the CDC is ready to recommend that people get COVID vaccine boosters at 8 months. The WHO thinks that they aren't needed yet and it will decrease world supply of vaccine. The issue is that we are seeing more breakthrough infections with COVID, but for the most part they are relatively mild disease, not requiring hospitalization. Whether this truly warrants a booster or if we should wait a little longer probably depends on your perspective.
As far as medications, it takes a lot of post-hoc analysis and monitoring to identify some of the issues in them. It would be nice, I suppose, to have trials lasting ten years that involved a million patients. The reality is that no one could afford such a trial and it would take too long to get medications to the people who need them. What ends up happening is a few thousand people are in the Phase 3 trial for 2 to 3 years. This is enough to identify most major, common side effects, but there are still plenty of things that can crop up down the line.
Science tends to change it's opinion as more is learned about a particular situation. Early on, there was also the pragmatism surrounding protecting health care workers who had no choice but to face the pandemic head on when there was a shortage of PPE.
People who can't accept that science moves on, and what we thought was fact yesterday is not the case today are having a very difficult time figuring this out.
They wanted to be handed an owners manual for Covid 19, and refuse to acknowledge that such a thing just doesn't exist. Rather than accept this, they instead take the intellectually lazy route and just decide that the scientists don't know what they are talking about.
That this is happening with people who follow a particular political tribe really shows up how the conservative mind differs from the liberal mind. We really are wired differently, and for better or worse, one tribe is better suited to long term survival than the other one right now.
Note to mods, this is not politics, this is biology.
I knew we were in for a rough ride in January 2020 when people of Chinese descent bought our entire supply of N95 masks to send back to family in China. I expect this was happening everywhere there was an Asian diaspora.